Linus Torvalds Quotes

109 Sourced Quotes

Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.

Linus Torvalds
When you say, "I wrote a program that crashed Windows," people just stare at you blankly and say, "Hey, I got those with the system, for free."

Linus Torvalds
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

Linus Torvalds
There are literally several levels of SCO being wrong. And even if we were to live in that alternate universe where SCO would be right, they'd still be wrong.

Linus Torvalds
An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program.

Linus Torvalds
See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too ;-)

Linus Torvalds
The fact that ACPI was designed by a group of monkeys high on LSD, and is some of the worst designs in the industry obviously makes running it at any point pretty damn ugly.

Linus Torvalds
Get rid of it. And I don't *ever* want to see that shit again.

Linus Torvalds
Because if you want me to "act professional", I can tell you that I'm not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what "acting professionally" results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.

Linus Torvalds
…the Linux philosophy is "laugh in the face of danger". Oops. Wrong one. "Do it yourself". That's it.

Linus Torvalds
People say that you should not micro-optimize. But if what you love is micro-optimization... that's what you should do.

Linus Torvalds
To kind of explain what Linux is, you have to explain what an operating system is. And the thing about an operating system is that you're never ever supposed to see it. Because nobody really uses an operating system; people use programs on their computer. And the only mission in life of an operating system is to help those programs run. So an operating system never does anything on its own; it's only waiting for the programs to ask for certain resources, or ask for a certain file on the disk, or ask to connect to the outside world. And then the operating system steps in and tries to make it easy for people to write programs.

Linus Torvalds
I realize that lawyers are brought up (probably from small children) to think that "technically true" is what matters, but when you make public PR statements, they should be more than "technically" true. They should be honest. There's a big difference.

Linus Torvalds
I claim that Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots.

Linus Torvalds
No. That's it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able to say "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too technical.

Linus Torvalds
It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning.

Linus Torvalds
Christ, people. Learn C, instead of just stringing random characters together until it compiles (with warnings).

Linus Torvalds
Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100 mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.

Linus Torvalds
Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.

Linus Torvalds
Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of Minix.

Linus Torvalds
There aren't enough swear-words in the English language, so now I'll have to call you perkeleen vittupää just to express my disgust and frustration with this crap.

Linus Torvalds
In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people.

Linus Torvalds
I'd like to say that I knew this would happen, that it's all part of the plan for world domination.

Linus Torvalds
If you have ever done any security work – and it did not involve the concept of "network of trust" – it wasn't security work, it was – masturbation. I don't know what you were doing. But trust me, it's the only way you can do security, it's the only way you can do development.

Linus Torvalds
If you still don't like it, that's OK: that's why I'm boss. I simply know better than you do.

Linus Torvalds